as she could to see what Susan Shorrs looked like. She giggled
over a verse that was scrawled beside the mirror...
Rouge your hair and comb your face;
Many a third head is lost in this place.
... and then the shift came, doubly frightening because of
what she knew she was going to do.
Especially if you were a hyperalter like Mary, you were
supposed to have some sense of the passage of time while
you were out of shift. Of course, you did not know what was
going on, but it was as though a more or less accurate
chronometer kept running when you went out of shift. Ap-
parently Mary's was highly inaccurate, because, to her horror,
she found herself sitting bolt upright in one of Mrs. Harris's
classes, not out on the playgrounds, where she had expected
Susan Shorrs to be.
Mary was terrified, and the ugly school dress Susan had
been wearing accented, by its strangeness, the seriousness of
her premature shift. Children weren't supposed to show much
difference from hyperalter to hypoalter, but when she raised
her eyes, her fright grew. Children did change. She hardly rec-
ognized anyone in the room, though most of them must be
the alters of her own classmates. Mrs. Harris was a B-shift and
overlapped both Mary and Susan, but otherwise Mary recog-
nized only Carl Biair's hypoalter because of his freckles.
Mary knew she had to get out of there or Mrs. Harris
would eventually recognize her. If she left the room quietly,
Mrs. Harris would not question her unless she recognized
her. It was no use trying to guess how Susan would walk.
Mary stood and went towards the door, glad that it turned
her back to Mrs. Harris. It seemed to her that she could feel
the teacher's eyes stabbing through her back.
But she walked safely from the room. She dashed down' the
school corridor and out into the street. So great was her fear
of what she was doing that her hypoalter's world actually
seemed like a different one.
It was a long way for Mary to walk across town, and
when she rang the bell, Conrad Manz was already home from
work. He smiled at her and she loved him at once.
'Well, what do you want, young lady?' he asked.
Mary couldn't answer him. She just smiled back.
'What's your name, eh?'
Mary went right on smiling, but suddenly he blurred in front
of her.
'Here, here! There's nothing to cry about. Come on in
and let's see if we can help you. Clara! We have a visitor, a
very sentimental visitor.'
Mary let him put his big arm around her shoulder and
draw her, crying, into the apartment. Then she saw Clara
swimming before her, looking like her mother, but. . . no, not
